Philip Guston in the collection of thePhilip Guston in the collection of theMuseum of Modern ArtMuseum of Modern Art

Author

Museum of Modern Art (New York, N.Y.)

Date

1992

Publisher

The Museum of Modern Art

Exhibition URL

www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/370

The Museum of Modern Art's exhibition history—

from our founding in 1929 to the present—is

available online. It includes exhibition catalogues,

primary documents, installation views, and an

index of participating artists.

© 2017 The Museum of Modern ArtMoMA

Philip Guston

in the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art

Philip Guston

in the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art

The Museum of Modern Art, New York

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This publication is made possible by a generous grant from

Mrs. Victor W. Ganz in honor of her friendship with Agnes Gund.

Published in conjunction with the exhibition Philip Guston: Works from the Collection

Organized by Kirk Varnedoe, Director, Department of Painting and Sculpture

The Museum of Modern Art, New York, summer 1992

Copyright © 1992 The Museum of Modern Art, New York

All rights reserved

Edited by Harriet S. Bee

Designed by Emily Waters

Production by John Donahue

Photograph Credits: Courtesy Associated American Artists: 16; Bevan Davies: 27, 32; Bevan Davies, courtesy

McKee Gallery, New York: 28, 29, 30; © Gemini G.E.L., Los Angeles, California, 1980: 31; Courtesy The Estate of

Philip Guston: 18, 21, 22; Kate Keller, The Museum of Modern Art: 6, 8, 9, 12, 14, 17; Courtesy McKee Gallery,

New York: front cover, back cover, 15, 24, 26; Mali Olatunji, The Museum of Modern Art: title page, 11, 25.

Front cover: City Limits. 1969. Oil on canvas, 6' 5" x 8' yV" (195.6 x 262.2 cm). Gift of Musa Guston

Back cover: Untitled. (1980). Synthetic polymer paint and ink on board, 20 x 30" (50.8 x 76.2 cm).

Gift of Musa Guston

Title page: Wrapped. 1969. Pastel, iylA x 21 lA" (43.7 x 54.4 cm). Purchase

The Museum of Modern Art

ix West 53 Street

New York, New York 10019

Printed in the United States of America

TKo Museum of Modern Art libc^fY

CONTENTS

Foreword

Richard E. Oldenburg

Acknowledgments

Kirk Varnedoe

Guston's Trace

Robert Storr

Catalogue of the Collection

FOREWORD

The great quality and depth of the collection of The Museum of Modern Art are due to several forces. Chief

among them are discerning acquisitions by curators and generous gifts from donors. Among the latter, a spe

cially treasured strength of the collection has always been the works given by artists themselves, or by their

heirs. We are deeply grateful to the widow of Philip Guston, the late Musa Guston, for continuing that valued

tradition, and to their daughter Musa Mayer for her gracious cooperation. Adding to previous donations of

important works on paper, Mrs. Guston further honored this Museum with the extraordinary gift of four

paintings from the estate of the artist and with the bequest of three additional works following her death in

April 1992. These donations, in addition to the paintings, drawings, and prints by Guston previously acquired,

now give the Museum the most important Guston collection in any public institution in the world.

The mission of The Museum of Modern Art is not only to preserve and display such major works, but

also to make them accessible to a broad public, as well as to art scholars through research and documentation,

educational programs, and publishing. We are therefore particularly pleased to be able to mark the recent

expansion of our Guston holdings with this publication, accompanying a special installation of works by

Guston in our collection in the summer of 1992 and providing a permanent record of our comprehensive rep

resentation of his work in several mediums. The publication has been made possible by a most generous grant

from Mrs. Victor W. Ganz in honor of Agnes Gund, President of The Museum of Modern Art. We express our

very warm thanks to Mrs. Ganz for this gracious and thoughtful support.

RICHARD E. OLDENBURG

Director

The Museum of Modern Art

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Public collections often seek a balance between broad historical coverage and concentration in depth on the

work of particular artists. The former entails the occasionally tepid comforts of historical correctness, but it is

the latter that gives a collection its character and curators some of their most rewarding moments. The Muse

um of Modern Art is especially fortunate to have acquired the work of Philip Guston in profound depth both

because of the quality of the work itself and because the unique blend of consistencies and contradictions in

Guston's career illuminates some of the central challenges and crises in American art during his time.

The recent donations of seven works as well as an earlier gift of ten on paper by the widow of Philip Gus

ton reflect her faith in The Museum of Modern Art, and also honor the models of scholarly attention to

Guston's work set by Magdalena Dabrowski, Curator in the Department of Drawings, and Robert Storr, Cura

tor in the Department of Painting and Sculpture. Ms. Dabrowski's 1988 exhibition and catalogue The Drawings

of Philip Guston, published by the Museum, reaffirmed its engagement with his oeuvre; Mr. Storr has written

extensively on Guston, most notably in his book Philip Guston, published in 1986 by Abbeville Press. I warmly

thank these curators for their important roles in bringing this rich representation of Guston's work to the

Museum, and in making it intellectually accessible to the public.

I also wish to acknowledge the generous assistance given the Museum by David McKee, of the McKee

Gallery, New York, and his assistant Bruce Hackney in all matters related to Guston's oeuvre. Thanks are

also owed those individuals without whose cooperation and hard work the present exhibition and publication

would not have been possible: Riva Castleman, Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs and Director of the

Department of Prints and Illustrated Books; Michael Hentges, Director of Graphics, and Emily Waters, Senior

Designer; Harriet S. Bee, Managing Editor, and Jessica Altholz, Assistant Editor, Department of Publications;

and Victoria Garvin, Assistant to the Director, Department of Painting and Sculpture.

Finally and most importantly, I join Richard Oldenburg in expressing profound gratitude to the late Musa

Guston for her exceptional gifts and to her daughter Musa Mayer for her kind support; and I redouble his grat

itude to Mrs. Victor W. Ganz, who has so generously supported this publication honoring Agnes Gund.

KIRK VARNEDOE

Director

Department of Painting and Sculpture

Red Painting. 1950. Oil on canvas, 34l/s x 62 1U" (86.4 x 158.1 cm). Bequest of the artist

GUSTON'S TRACE

By Robert Storr

Philip Guston painted for the long haul.

Of his contemporaries Jackson Pollock, Willem de

Kooning, Mark Rothko, and Franz Kline, none was

better prepared to extend the classical studio tradi

tion in which they had been trained than Guston.

Yet along with the others, he rejected that tradition

at mid-century for the sake of an exploratory abstrac

tion. Alone out of this cohort, however, Guston

resumed making narrative pictures during the final

decade of his life. The most lyric painter of first-

generation Abstract Expressionists, he subsequently

became the most daring exponent of the return to

gestural figuration that began to flourish after the

1960s heyday of purely nonobjective formalism. The

slow, nuance-bedeviled composer of the 1950s

became the prolific storyteller of the 1970s, a master

of atmospheres and weights, of impacted shapes and

heavy tides of paint, of burlesque pathos and unspar

ing self-inquisition.

In a sense, Guston saved the best for last. Or,

rather, with the spiderlike concentration of someone

ensnared by his own experience, he wove and rewove

his painterly web, feverishly rearranging the images

that crowded his adhesive imagination, unknotting

this symbol or that "thing" to get a closer look, only

then to rebind them for future inspection or trans

formation. Guston died in Woodstock, New York,

in 1980, before he could complete this task, leaving

loose ends that have been seized upon by numerous

younger artists on whom his influence is evident and

usually acknowledged. Meanwhile, in the dozen

years since his death, public awareness of Guston has

grown immeasurably.

The body of Guston's paintings, drawings, and

prints now in the collection of The Museum of

Modern Art constitutes the largest and most repre

sentative selection of his art available to the public

anywhere. These holdings have recently been aug

mented by the generosity of his late wife Musa, who,

in addition to earlier donations, in 1991 gave four

major pictures, and in 1992 bequeathed three

additional works to the Museum. These works —

North , 1961-62, Box and Shadow, 1969, City Limits,

1978, and East Coker T.S.E., 1979, plus two untitled

works, of 1969 and 1971, and another titled Head, of

1977— seen here together with works previously

acquired, chart the artist's course from 1950 through

1980: his turning away from image-making, his evo

lution as an abstract painter, and then his startling

reinvention of autobiographical and allegorical

figuration. As already indicated, every phase of the

artist's work was thoroughly prepared, but more than

any other period, it is the last decade that demon

strates the richness of his painting culture.

Guston was born in Montreal, Canada, in 1913, to

Jewish emigres from Odessa, in the Ukraine, who

left around the turn of the century. In 1919 his family

Untitled. (1955). Brush and ink, 17% x 22 7Is"

(58.1 x 45.1 cm). Gift of Herbert Ferber

moved to California where, unable to cope with the

stress of American life, his father killed himself a year

later. Raised with seven older siblings by his mother,

who encouraged her youngest son's artistic bent,

Guston rapidly became assimilated to his surround

ings in Los Angeles. A movie fan and avid imitator of

the comics during his childhood, he had an early and

propitious introduction to experimental art. Expelled

from Manual Arts High School in 1928, along with

his classmate Jackson Pollock, for producing satirical

broadsides, Guston pursued his aesthetic education

under the guidance of two mentors — a teacher and

an established painter — who lent him avant-garde

magazines, such as The Dial , and arranged visits to

the Hollywood house of Walter and Louise Arens-

berg, whose pioneering collection of modern art

included over two hundred important works by

some fifty painters and sculptors. At the Arensberg's

Guston first saw Cubist paintings by Pablo Picasso,

Georges Braque, Juan Gris, Fernand Leger, and

Marcel Duchamp. There also he discovered the arid,

proto-Surrealist fantasies of Giorgio de Chirico, who

was to be a major influence on his work throughout

his life but especially during the 1970s. Around the

same time he witnessed Jose Clemente Orozco and

David Alfaro Siqueiros paint murals in Los Angeles.

Torn between the two tendencies, represented by

Italian "Metaphysical" painting on the one hand and

the heroic art of the Mexicans on the other, Guston's

own work alternated between exquisitely rendered

commedia dell'arte scenes, and dramatic depictions

of the Ku Klux Klan's persecution of blacks.

During the Depression years the call to make

public art won out. In 1934 Guston went to Mexico

under Siqueiros's patronage to paint a spatially com

plex fresco that featured Klansmen as anonymous

symbols of oppression. Beckoned by letters from

Pollock who had headed east when his friend had

gone to Mexico, Guston moved to New York the fol

lowing year. Once there, he promptly established

himself as one of the most acclaimed muralists of the

Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Adminis

tration (WPA), which during the Depression spon

sored a wide range of public art programs and

sustained countless artists — including Pollock,

de Kooning, and Arshile Gorky — who would other

wise have been unable to pursue their work. Despite

his success, Guston soon began to have doubts about

the formal conservatism of his Renaissance-inspired

manner. These doubts were underscored by regular

contact with the work of Max Beckmann, Leger,

Picasso, and other modernists in New York galleries

and museums. Redoubling this unease were his stu

dio acquaintance with Stuart Davis, whose painterly

pragmatism contrasted sharply with Guston's fastidi

ous technique, and his sometimes acrimonious

debates with Pollock, then still grappling with the

dynamic formulas of Thomas Hart Benton and the

symbolic violence of Orozco.

Anxious to experiment with new approaches

away from the pressures of New York, Guston

accepted a teaching job at the University of Iowa

Painting. 1954. Oil on canvas, 63 V* x 60 Vs" (160.6 x 152.7 cm). Philip Johnson Fund

in Iowa City (1941-45) and, afterwards, another at

Washington University in St. Louis (1945-47).

Brooding, subtle, and few in number, the pictures

completed during this internal exile mixed

de Chirico-like symbols and cityscapes, with bits of

mid-western Americana, and Beckmannesque

Expressionism. Guston's isolation did not, however,

prevent his work from receiving recognition unprece

dented in the experience of his peers. A First Prize for

Painting at the Carnegie Institute's annual show of

American art in 1945, a feature article in Life maga

zine in 1946, and a fellowship to the American Acad

emy in Rome in 1948 assured him a prominent place

in the art establishment of the period. Abandoning

figuration, as he was about to do in spite of these

honors, thus involved more than disengaging from

his past; he was wagering an otherwise secure future

as well.

Red Painting , 1950 (page 6), was the last in a series of

obsessively reworked canvases in which Guston made

the transition to abstraction, and it was the first of

them to have the allover structure that was hence

forth characteristic of his art and of Abstract Expres

sionism generally. The two major paintings that

preceded it— The Tormentors, 1947-48 (San Fran

cisco Museum of Modern Art), and Review, 1949—50

(Estate of Philip Guston) — contained vestiges of

forms found in his earlier work: irregular plaques and

bars of color, hoodlike cones, rings, shoe-heel cres

cents, and stitching or nail-head strokes. Although

they are flattened tonal compositions of modulated

blacks and reds, both still allude to volumetric space.

With its bottom edge functioning as a ground plane,

The Tormentors is like a shelf crammed with spectral

shapes as if one had X-rayed a Giorgio Morandi still

life. Review, meanwhile, is divided between a dark

"sky' above and what looks like a Roman wall stud

ded with archeological fragments.

Although murky purple, green, brown, and

orange wedges encrust it, and lines of various colors

and lengths slide across it, Red Painting is, by con

trast, essentially monochromatic. The canvas's domi

nant ruddy cast owes much to repeated scraping and

scoring of the surface, which at times resembles a

brittle version of the rich palette-knife surfaces of

Clyfford Still. This technique is atypical of Guston

though he regularly used a knife to skin preliminary

layers off a work to make room for fresh paint, some

times letting the tool's smear show at the margins or

between brushstrokes. One result of having relied so

much on a knife in this instance was the muddying

of other pure hues to the point where one can barely

distinguish them from their background but for the

differences in value or the subdued chromatic buzz

they set off in the surrounding red. The other conse

quence is that the work absorbs more light than it

radiates or reflects, and in that way it differs sharply

from Still's lightning-bolt fractured and illuminated

expanses of raw color. Without horizon or depth,

Guston's surface flickers with short brush marks,

scratches, and erasures that never resolve themselves

into self-contained forms; nor do they quite dissolve

into a uniform field. Compared to the other two

paintings, it has the feel of a tapestry that has been

worn until the embroidered detail that highlighted

the fabric was rubbed away, leaving visible the frayed,

patchy under-weave. In fact, Guston had painted

over a picture whose subtle reversals of figure and

ground were much like those in Review prior to his

last-minute revisions. The change greatly surprised

curator Andrew Carnduff Ritchie who had chosen

Red Painting in its earlier state for inclusion in his

1951 Museum of Modern Art survey, Abstract Paint

ing and Sculpture in America. Nonetheless, the result

was of decisive importance to Guston's development.

The decision to drastically alter the work was evi

dence of his uncompromising pursuit of a new

painterly syntax, and also focused attention on the

question much debated by Abstract Expressionists as

to when, if ever, a painting was "finished." After Red

Painting Guston was finished with abstracted pic

tures and set to make abstract paintings.

Painting, 1954 (page 9), which confirmed

The Clock. 1956-57. Oil on canvas, 6' 4" x 64 Vs" (193.1 x 163 cm). Gift of Mrs. Bliss Parkinson

Head—Double View. 1958. Brush and ink, 20 x 24 7ls" (50.7 x 63.2 cm). Purchase

Gustons new direction, remains one of his signal

achievements. Gone from this canvas are the physical

modesty and second thoughts of Red Painting. Much

larger than that transitional work, Painting is imbued

with a delicacy of another source and order. Above

all it is the product of a greater immediacy of execu

tion. Rather than block out and revise his shapes as

before, Guston approached his new canvases without

premeditation. He mapped the picture plane in short

marks and intervals, working close to the surface and

stepping back to examine the general composition

only after long stretches. This meditative notational

style derives in part from landscape studies the artist

made while traveling in Europe during his time at

the American Academy in Rome, and in part from

the shifting bars and axes used by Piet Mondrian in

his "plus-minus" works of 1913—17.

Guston's drawings of the period done with india

ink and reed pen — a preferred medium of two other

Dutch masters, Rembrandt van Rijn and Vincent

van Gogh — or a bristle brush, such as Untitled, 1955

(page 8), display Guston's loose crisscross armature in

its bare, shifting essentials, accented in this particular

example by halftone washes and a circumflex stroke.

Sometimes hovering in the middle ground, some

times cascading from the top of a sheet to the bot

tom, the mesh of this and similar works crackled

with the unpredictably flaring, skipping, splaying,

and petering out of the simple repertoire of basic

marks that composed it. Translated into modulated

red and roseate pastes in Painting, this graphic struc

ture shimmers on the caked grays and pale green and

yellow tints that form the canvas' ground. Miscon

struing Guston's method and intent, some critics of

the period labeled him an Abstract Impressionist. He

was nothing of the kind. Approximating nature was

the furthest thing from the artist's mind, whatever

superficial resemblance there might be between the

luminous atmospheres in his paintings and those in

works by Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley, or Camille

Pissarro. In fact, Guston's aim was much closer to

that of Mondrian in that he, too, sought to establish

a dynamic equilibrium within a field of simple but

unequal and asymmetrically deployed elements.

Without Mondrian's Utopian belief that art's essential

terms could ever be known or their logic codified,

Guston eschewed formal research for its own sake

just as he shunned the idea of aesthetic progress.

Instead, he hoped to find the means of recording

unique experiences of an intuitive order that are the

restorative exception to the anxious disorder of the

normal human condition. Each work, an epiphany

in paint, thus consisted of the material residue of

concentration over time, and each preserved a fragile

and uncertain grace.

While in Rome in 1949 Guston had become

friendly with the avant-garde composer John Cage,

and soon afterward in New York established with

Cage the kind of creative bond with an artist outside

his own discipline that he would later have with a

number of writers during the 1960s and 1970s. Along

with Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Rauschenberg, and

Jasper Johns, Guston was thus one of four major

painters — and the eldest and most experienced

among them — who in that period responded directly

to Cage's riddling advocacy of the aesthetics of

chance. Predisposed to anguished misgivings about

the meaning of what he made, Guston found in

Cage's lucid defense of "non-meaning" and his faith

in accidental enlightenment both a spiritual release

and a practical course of action. Thus his canvases of

the early 1950s are the least emotionally demonstra

tive or physically aggressive of Abstract Expressionist

paintings; based on the Cageian model, they instead

mirror the act of disinterested and virtually disem

bodied perception.

Guston's fascination with serene "nothingness"

eventually succumbed to a nagging preoccupation

with the disturbed and disturbing "somethingness"

ingrained in his abstractions. By the middle of the

decade his palette changed dramatically, and his

gesture broadened in response to that awareness, as

can be seen in The Clock, a work of 1956—57 (page 11).

Enriched by a greater range of saturated hues and

accidental admixtures, as well as by sharper and more

extreme tonal contrasts, his paintings of this period

were suffused by a kind of chromatic chiaroscuro.

Doubtless under the influence of Beckmann, who

had intensified his already high-keyed color by sur

rounding it with heavy black lines, Guston increas

ingly interspersed his reds, oranges, blues, ochers,

browns, pinks, and greens with flurries and plugs of

black pigment. As a consequence of this and the

thickening of his strokes, the once seemingly distant

patches of paint that spread through the tonal void

of his paintings burst forward toward the viewer, all

but occluding that emptiness. Whereas in earlier

nonobjective paintings the exact compositional cen

ter shifted with the movement of the eye across a dis

integrating grid, by the late 1950s the center's holding

power was overwhelmed by the profusion of gnarled,

rootless forms.

The centrifugal force active in these works is

matched by an equally strong centripetal pull. Falling

inward, the separate, sometimes swollen, sometimes

wrinkled clots of paint that occupy the middle

ground of The Clock coalesce into an irregular amal

gam that flutters at its periphery and churns at its

core. The interior and exterior stresses at work seem

about to give substance to a new but as yet undis-

cernible entity. Roughly contemporaneous drawings

like Head —Double View, 1958, for example,

announce the return of representation without its

meandering contour lines or tight hatches ever actu

ally configuring a recognizable face. Neither is The

Clock a picture of its namesake, although, like

Painting, the time its creation took is marked upon

it. In this instance, however, time's imprint appears

on lumps of what seems to be organic matter that

sends a shiver into the space around it. Vibrating

between implosion and explosion, the increments of

paint that build this central mass tick off the

moments before their accumulation decisively takes

or loses shape. These are the suspended moments

in which artist and viewer contemplate a palpable

but forever indeterminate imaginative possibility.

Untitled. (June 20-26) 1963. Lithograph, 24% x 313/8M (62.5 x 79.7 cm).

Gift of Kleiner, Bell & Co.

By 1957 figuration was again latent in every ges

ture Guston made. Moreover, one often perceives a

narrative interaction among a given painting's ele

ments, as if its clustered forms were a crowd of actors

waiting to be assigned parts. Such a reading is borne

out by the artist's enthusiasm for filmmaker Federico

Fellini, in whom he found a poetic theatricality akin

to that of de Chirico. Guston could not help but ani

mate abstraction. If, as art historian Henri Focillon

maintained, form has spirit, then sooner or later that

spirit is bound to express its will and not necessarily

in ways the artist wishes or can harness to his con

scious intentions. Such was Guston's predicament.

Having spent most of the 1950s enjoying the hard-

won freedom to paint without describing, during

most of the next decade Guston grappled with the

tendency of pure form to acquire the impure attrib

utes of images.

Whenever Guston doubted his aesthetic course,

he turned to drawing. Graphic means and formats

afforded him the freedom to work exactly as fast or

as slowly as he thought, unhampered by the pauses

drying paint required and by the other physical

demands of large-scale canvases. Worrying a shape

into existence, questioning or obliterating its identity

with additional marks and then rephrasing it on

another sheet in a few naked lines, Guston simulta

neously elaborated and stripped-down his basic

vocabulary.

Beginning in the 1960s, printmaking added a

third option that combined the spontaneity of draw

ing with painting's unpredictable delayed effects.

Lithography, with its almost unrestricted capacity to

reproduce nuances of touch, was Guston's natural

choice of medium, and he turned to it twice in this

period, working with Tamarind Lithography Work

shop in 1963 and Hollander Workshop in 1966. A

few of these prints were executed in lithographic

crayon — for example, Untitled, 1963. The rest were

done with tusche, a dark black lithography ink

that the artist sometimes used full strength and

sometimes diluted. Loosely bunched together the

North. 1961-62. Oil on canvas, 69" x 6' 5" (175.3 x 195.6 cm). Gift of Musa Guston

15

Open Washes. 1966. Lithograph, 2015/ie x 289/ig" (51.6 x 72.6 cm).

Gift of Associated American Artists

blotted lozenges, amoebic washes, and raveling con

tours that fill these lithographs have a decidedly pic-

tographic quality. With hindsight one can already

make out in embryonic form the shoes, cups,

profiles, fists, and bottles that emerged fully in works

made after 1968. It is also possible to see in these

prints a clear precursor to the calligraphic manner

developed by Brice Marden since he began in 1985 to

reintegrate freehand drawing into the unified rectan

gle of his Minimalist panel paintings.

Even in this abstract mode, for Guston drawing

was the equivalent of writing. His ties to writers were

strong during the 1960s and became stronger and

more numerous as the distance widened between

him and many of his old New York School

colleagues — a gap that grew in proportion to his

reservations about abstraction. Collaborative projects

were frequently the offshoots of his literary friend

ships. Over the years he lettered and embellished

covers, single lyrics, and in some cases entire books

by Clark Coolidge, Ann Waldman, William Corbett,

and Bill Berkson; he also penned a series of carica

tures of Richard Nixon and his administration

inspired by conversations with his neighbor Philip

Roth, who was working on a satiric novel on the

Watergate gang. Among the most beautiful of all

these verbal/visual dialogues are the graphic interpre

tations he made of poems written by his wife Musa.

One year after the accidental death of poet, critic,

and Museum of Modern Art curator Frank O'Hara

in 1966, the Museum published a commemorative

collection of his poems, decorated by his artist

friends, titled In Memory of My Feelings. Guston con

tributed to this volume six ink-on-plastic drawings,

which he selected from a total of fifteen, to frame the

typeset text of O'Haras Ode to Michael Goldberg, one

of the longer poems. Their quick and easy line nicely

complements the poet's fluent colloquial voice, but

belies the personal and artistic crisis toward which

Guston knew he was headed.

From i960 to 1967, when Guston stopped work

ing on canvas altogether for about two years, his

paintings became structurally simpler, increasingly

tonal, and thus that much more like his drawings.

Made during one of the most difficult creative

periods of his life, they are the least well known

and most underrated paintings Guston made. North,

1961-62 (page 15), is an exemplar of these works and

of the process of reduction and consolidation that

motivated them.

Leaving the framing edges of the painting loose

and untouched except for the primer coat, and bury

ing the colorful underpainting beneath successive

layers of wet-into-wet painted grays, Guston concen

trated his energies on positioning and redrafting the

three snarled elements that occupy the middle

ground. Highlighted by touches of orange-gold,

these gestural knots have as yet no clear identity, and

their frontal but unstable placement within that

slathered gray field looks back to a similar, albeit

more hesitant, treatment of forms in Review. The

tension between gathering matter and diffusing light

in North meanwhile suggests parallels with Alberto

Giacometti's grisaille paintings, as does Guston's

paint handling. Like Giacometti's efforts to capture

the solidity of his model despite the impossibility of

ever accurately fixing his perceptions, each of Gus

ton's stabs at delineating a shape or area was doomed

to subtract as much as it added to the result, as if

painting were a hopeless battle to check erosion con

ducted along a muddy embankment where shoring

up one formation was bound to undermine the next.

After North, however, Guston's shapes became

increasingly massive and their backgrounds increas

ingly dense. Modeling headlike lumps of heavy vis

cous pigment, Guston seemed intent on conjuring

human beings out of common clay. According to

mystical cabalistic legend, such imitation of divine

creation by mortal man could only produce mon

sters. In Guston's case it did.

The incubation of these monsters took place

between 1968 and 1970, which were also among the

worst years of civil strife in this country's recent his

tory. Anguished over what was going on outside his

studio in the society at large, Guston kept his artistic

false starts and radical change of heart to himself.

The Street from the portfolio Ten Lithographs by Ten Artists. 1970 (published 1971).

Lithograph, 19ls/i6 x 263/s" (50.7 x 67 cm). Gift of Dr. Samuel Mandel

Untitled. 1969. Synthetic polymer paint on panel, 30 x 32" (76.2 x 81.2 cm). Bequest of Musa Guston

Making their appearance in a 1970 one-person show,

his new cast of characters forced itself on an

unwarned public like a band of marauders. Unwel

come to those who had expected from Guston a

refined Abstract Expressionism, these interlopers

shamelessly went about their business all the same.

The sphinxlike persona in the pastel drawing

Wrapped,, 1969 (see title page), serves as an appropri

ately threatening and inscrutable scout for this rau

cous raiding party. Compact, bluntly described, and

emblematic, this bust nonetheless recalls the fraying

Head — Double View of 1958 in its featureless but

heavily scored countenance. More antic versions of

this masked brute soon followed. In City Limits, 1969

(see front cover), a three-man crew of slapstick thugs

cruises a vacant metropolis in an old jalopy. It is

unclear who they are, but plainly they are up to no

good. Their iconographic antecedents can, of course,

be found in Guston's anti-Klan murals of the 1930s.

As bad as things were in 1969, however, the Klan was

not the widespread domestic menace it has since

become. Rather than invoking an actual and specific

evil, the hooded men Guston called "those little bas

tards" were symbolic embodiments of a general

know-nothing violence, as were the clenched fists

that appeared out of nowhere in prints such as The

Street, 1970 (page 17), along with the flying bricks

that fill the air and the half-buried legs that litter the

foreground. Even so, a simple desire to make protest

pictures hardly squares with the cartoon manner

Guston seems to have adopted suddenly. The change

was, in fact, gradual and deeply rooted. It had taken

the artist two years of working on small, single-image

panels to identify his protagonists, their attributes,

and their settings; and nearly all of these works hark

back to images found in his paintings of the 1930s

and 1940s. The type of caricature in which he

rephrased them, meanwhile, dated to the artist's

childhood imitations of comic strips such as Krazy

Kat and Barney Google as well as to satirical portraits

of fellow artists done during the 1950s and 1960s.

Nevertheless, the basic armature of Guston's

abstract paintings remained intact behind the objects

and activities depicted in this revived graphic style.

Applied solely and directly to the once insubstantial

structures, that broad treatment lent his objects an

ambiguous and uncanny bulk. The blunt horizontals

and verticals of Untitled, 1969, laid over a thick bed

of grays, describe what initially seems to be a wholly

nonobjective grid but is in fact a brick wall, which is

inexplicably transparent despite its ostensibly heavy

construction.

Untitled {Rome, 1971), painted two years later

during a visit to Italy (page 21), returns to the

image — with a difference. This time the wall is a

solid red, and suspended above it in close formation

is a hail of flying bricks whose gravity-defying

chunkiness makes the wall below seem as flimsy as

a stage flat. However, their unusual spacing and

position recall Guston's paintings of 1952-54, whose

delicate horizontal and vertical strokes seem to be

mimicked by the bricks in their elephantine

proportions.

Using this vernacular manual of style, what Gus

ton wanted to do, he said in 1970, was to tell stories.

The principle story told in paintings such as City

Limits is that of an America run afoul of its liberal

promise. It is a tale of blundering meanness and self-

betrayal. Identifying himself with Klansmen, as he

does in several pictures showing a sheet-covered artist

at his easel, Guston insisted on depicting the fascina

tion cruelty holds even for the civilized. At a time of

crisis, when many decried the actions of nefarious

"outside agitators" or consoled themselves with

thoughts of their own good intentions, Guston was

reminding his fellow citizens that we remain our own

worst enemies. Setting scenes and cuing his ill-

starred cast in a more broadly brushed version of his

abstract gestural manner, Guston, like a film director,

reinvented what Harold Rosenberg had once called

Action Painting as a paradoxically comic and horri

ble "Action!" painting that was antically cartoon

like rather than anxiously refined, yet for all that

possessed of a strange baroque grandeur.

While recondite images filled the artists mind

and social discord prompted his angry response,

domestic reality also inspired some of Guston's best,

most mysterious, and most troubling pictures of the

1970s. For many of these his wife Musa was quite lit

erally his muse. It is her parted hair that appears on

the horizon in many canvases, like drawn theater

curtains bracketing a brow whose thoughts one can

not read. It is her raised eyes that are visible above

the flood in other pictures; and at least once her tears

are its source. Simultaneously mythic and painfully

intimate, these paintings are scenes from a difficult

but enduring marriage.

Head, 1977 (page 22), is the starkest among

them. Made shortly after Musa suffered a series of

small strokes, it is a painting of a wound. Only the

simple contours of a shaven head frame the drawn-

back flaps and interlaced sutures of this surgical win

dow on the brain. Yet the contrast between the

ugliness of the stitched aperture and the delicacy of

the profile makes an indelible impression of the

fragility of the life at stake and the crudeness of med

ical necessity. Other paintings describe Guston's

marital ambivalence and guilt, the result of his

single-minded concentration on his art. Inspired by

near loss, Head, in contrast, is a modern ex-voto and

testament to his abiding love.

Almost a decade after City Limits Guston

painted Box and Shadow, 1978 (page 24), the sym

metrical stillness of which seems the antithesis of the

clamorously eventful Klan pictures. Divided into

essentially monochromatic bars and bands, its back

ground is expansive and nearly abstract, as if the

artist had rendered Mark Rothko's or Barnett New

man's "sublime" in warm red mud. The lush oleagi

nous brushwork of Guston's late paintings is most

evident here, especially in the monochrome areas

where the artist was able to cut loose, confident that

the uniform color would contain within its pictorial

boundaries the tumult stirred by his hand. Closely

examined, these areas show the full repertoire of his

strokes; slathered zig-zags, suave sweeps, and dragged

sticky pastes. Storyteller that he was, Guston under

stood that the best tales are those that resonate in the

senses as well as in the mind, and so he rehearsed his

gesture and extended its range like an actor practic

ing his lines in various vocal registers and at different

volumes — from a dry whisper to a resounding laugh

or a booming speech.

At the center foreground of Box and Shadow a

spider is poised atop a nail-studded crate that casts a

long evening shadow across a scorched wasteland.

The location and contents of the box are unknown,

as are the reasons for the spider being there. The

choice and arrangement of symbols, recalling the

hermetic still lifes of de Chirico, are enigmas —

impenetrable but therefore inexhaustible points of

focus for speculation. Though never a Surrealist,

Guston, like de Chirico, counted on the imaginative

friction generated by the juxtaposition of disparate

objects to release their inherent poetry. The large

dimensions of Guston's paintings deviate from the

example of the Italian's generally small works, how

ever, and significantly enhance their impact. In many

ways a traditional painter, de Chirico confined the

vastness of his dreams to the manageable, illusionistic

space of the framed easel picture. Extending his

visual and corporeal field of action to the scale of

what Clement Greenberg called American-type

Painting, Guston gave his visions an imposing

physical presence, and his canvases a literal monu-

mentality fully consonant with the depicted

monumentality of his images.

In contrast to the sparseness of Box and Shadow,

another work of the same year, Tomb (page 25), is a

symbol dump — or, rather, a cairn or headstone.

Piled on the shelves or steps of the black monolith

that blocks the sky-blue horizon are an assortment of

objects: a misshapen ball, an idle brush plunged into

a paint can, a still-smoking cigarette, and tiers of

luckless horseshoes that list and droop like rough

iron analogs to the sleek soft watches in Salvador

Dali's The Persistence of Memory of 1931. There all

of Guston's objects sit as if the painter had just

Untitled {Rome, 1971). 1971. Oil, 22 x 30" (55.9 x 76.2 cm). Bequest of Musa Guston

21

Head. 1977. Oil on canvas, 69V211 x 7' 1" (176.5 x 215.9 cm). Bequest of Musa Guston

22

abandoned them; and there they stay on their

pedestal, an epitaph composed of things instead of

words. The dead weight of this accumulation is no

accident. Typical of those items that surrounded him

in the studio, each is a memento mori of the artist,

and their ensemble constitutes a vanitas , a still-life

reminder of the fatal inconsequentiality of human

endeavor. Yet, never did Guston paint more vigor

ously than when contemplating his own mortality,

and of the many works he devoted to the subject in

his last years, none has greater force or mystery than

Tomb. Loading his brush with liver grays, charred-

bone blacks, and arterial reds, the artist delineated

these congested iconic forms with a painterly drafts

manship of commensurate density. "Stapling"

hatches onto worked tonal facets, binding edge

against edge with pigment welds and figure to

ground with pigment rivets until nothing moved,

Guston labored in his studio like Vulcan forging a

memorial from his own anvil.

In 1979 Guston suffered a near-fatal heart attack.

Death had made itself known to him directly, and

one of his responses was East Coker T.S.E., 1979

(page 26). After limning a sickbed self-portrait, Gus

ton recognized in it the likeness of T. S. Eliot, a

favorite author. Suspended in the dismal gray murk

of this intimate and comparatively small painting,

the poet is seen in livid profile. With his creased,

stubbly head on a comfortless pillow and his teeth

bared, he stares upward into space. On his throat

gathers a small blue cloud and from his nostrils seeps

a sooty mist of the same blue, as if his last breath

were escaping as we look. Among the most grotesque

of Guston's late pictures, it is nevertheless the least

cartoonlike. For all its physiognomic exaggerations —

the hooked nose, huge ears, and heavily corrugated

skin — the image is in fact disturbingly naturalistic.

What gallows humor there is is not entirely Guston's.

Death, after all, is the ultimate caricaturist. Under his

sardonic hand the face of the dying is transformed;

vital flesh retreats and less fragile features gain a

ridiculous but definitive prominence. Grinning into

the void, the last laugh would seem to be Eliot's,

however, as if the spiritually hypochondriacal poet

were amused finally by the absurd simplicity of it all.

"In my beginning is my end," reads the first line

of Eliot's poem East Coker, and as Guston faced his

own end images of closure multiplied. Unable during

his last months to attempt big canvases, Guston

committed these images to paper, producing a large

number of drawings, acrylics, and lithographs. Their

facture and mood vary from brutal to elegiac; slush

grays, dull blues and reds, and miserable yellows are

pervasive, but in some cases these off-tones blush

with crepuscular pinks, peaches, and purples. For all

its variety the iconography of these pictures is consis

tent in emphasis. Neither whimper nor bang ended

Guston's world but, instead, a general clatter punctu

ated by leaden thuds. Objects are responsible for

most of the noise. Canvas stretchers, chair backs, cof

fee cups, bottles, cigarettes, and other studio junk are

symbols of the artist, and the bent nails that rim the

stretchers or stud other objects are the self-mocking

stigmata of his vocation for aesthetic martyrdom.

Garbage-pail tops held up like shields, hairy paws,

stamping feet, and ominously clustered heads repre

sent an intrusion into studio chaos of agents of the

social chaos prevalent outside.

Scattered one by one over a bleak landscape or

regrouped into ill-assorted clusters, all these random

parts are emblematic of the disintegrating wholes to

which they formerly belonged. Many of these objects

represent verbs of motion, which their static posi

tions qualify, like adverbs of inertia. In Coat , a litho

graph of 1980 (page 31), the headless hulking shape of

a man, similar in silhouette to the contours of Tomb's

black mound, clasps old shoes to its side. They may

have come from Buster Brown, but in their forlorn

state they have all the poignancy of van Gogh's peas

ant boots; like his they are metaphors for their weary,

absent owner, and their number is symbolic of his

age and all the ground he has covered. Still other pic

tures feature legs entangled in ladders, Jacob's ladder

perhaps, or maybe a vertical variant on the myth of

Box and Shadow. 1978. Oil on canvas, 69 1ls" x 8' 25/s" (175.6 x 250.5 cm). Gift of Musa Guston

Tomb. 1978. Oil on canvas, 6' 6'/8M x 6' l3/«" (198.4 x 187.6 cm). Acquired through the

A. Conger Goodyear and Elizabeth Bliss Parkinson Funds and gift of the artist

East Coker T.S.E. 1979. Oil on canvas, 42 x 48" (106.7 x 122 cm). Gift of Musa Guston

Untitled. (1980). Synthetic polymer paint and ink on board, 20 x 30" (50.8 x 76.2 cm).

Gift of Mrs. Philip Guston

Sisyphus. And, if the emblematic rendering of an old

pressing iron Guston kept around his studio may be

read as an omega — last letter of the Greek alphabet

and sign of the end — then the conglomerates that

loom over the barren spaces of numerous late draw

ings and acrylics are its pictorial analogs. Wheels are

broken and their spokes torturously jammed

together and embedded in the earth; balls come to a

halt on steep inclines unable to roll further forward

yet somehow not rolling back either. Like glacial

erratics — huge boulders dropped by the melting ice

on an otherwise empty horizon — they are both

imposing and pathetically out of place.

Loneliness and effort haunt these inexplicable

leftovers. In contrast to the formal lightness that

characterizes the late styles of many artists, including

Monet, Henri Matisse, and even his friend de Koon

ing, Guston's last works seem heavier than ever, even

though their facture shows the unlabored efficiency

of a man who has all the know-how he needs and no

time to waste. In Guston's final works life seems like

a bad dream about weight, and feeling its full onus

seems akin to finding oneself transported to a planet

whose gravity is a hundred times that on earth. Rep

resenting the burden of a past that only increased as

he struggled ahead, the artist's mysterious accumula

tions were his resource and his nemesis. Guston's will

to bear that burden never flagged even when the

strength necessary to do so drained away. The burst

of graphic invention which concluded his creative

life expressed that determination to the fullest. And,

humor leavened his frustration and pessimism to the

end. Among the small acrylics of 1980 is one showing

a pull-chain hanging absurdly from the heavens as if

to say, "When you leave, remember to turn out the

lights." Too busy working, Guston left the lights on.

Untitled. (1980). Synthetic polymer paint and ink, 23 x 29" (58.4 x 73.6 cm).

Gift of Musa Guston

CATALOGUE OF THE COLLECTION

The following works by Philip Guston in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art are listed chronologi

cally within each of three groups: Paintings, Drawings, and Prints and Illustrated Books. Dates enclosed in paren

theses do not appear on the works themselves. Drawings, prints, and illustrated books are on paper unless

otherwise noted. Dimensions are given in feet and inches and in centimeters, height preceding width; sheet size

is given for drawings, composition size for prints, and page size for illustrated books. The means of acquisition

of the work by the Museum is followed by its acquisition number. Works illustrated in this publication are indi

cated at the end of the entry.

PAINTINGS

Red Painting. 1950. Oil on canvas, 34 '/s x 62 'A" (86.4 x

158.1 cm). Bequest of the artist. 419.81. Page 6

Painting. 1954. Oil on canvas, 63 'A x 60 Vs" (160.6 x

152.7 cm). Philip Johnson Fund. 7.56. Page 9

The Clock. 1956-57. Oil on canvas, 64" x 64 "/s" (193.1 x

163 cm). Gift of Mrs. Bliss Parkinson. 659.59. Page 11

North. 1961—62. Oil on canvas, 69" x 6' 5" (175.3 x

195.6 cm). Gift of Musa Guston. 365.91. Page 19

City Limits. 1969. Oil on canvas, 6' 5" x 8' 7 'A"

(195.6 x 262.2 cm). Gift of Musa Guston. 363.91. Front

cover

Untitled. 1969. Synthetic polymer paint on panel,

30 x 32" (76.2 x 81.2 cm). Bequest of Musa Guston.

201.92. Page 18

28

Untitled. (1980). Synthetic polymer paint and ink on board, 20 x 30" (50.8 x 76.2 cm).

Gift of Mrs. Philip Guston

Head. 1977. Oil on canvas, 69 V2" x 7' 1" (176.5 x

215.9 cm)- Bequest of Musa Guston. 200.92. Page 22

Tomb. 1978. Oil on canvas, 6' 61/ s" x 6' 13/f ' (198.4 x

187.6 cm). Acquired through the A. Conger Goodyear

and Elizabeth Bliss Parkinson Funds and gift of the

artist. 60.81. Page 25

Box and Shadow. 1978. Oil on canvas, 697s" x

8' 27s" (175.6 x 250.5 cm). Gift of Musa Guston.

362.91. Page 24

East Coker T.S.E. 1979. Oil on canvas, 42 x 48"

(106.7 x 122 cm). Gift of Musa Guston. 364.91. Page 26

DRAWINGS

Untitled. (1955). Brush and ink, 17S4 x 227s" (58.1 x

45.1 cm). Gift of Herbert Ferber. 702.76. Page 8

Head — Double View. 1958. Brush and ink, 20 x 247s"

(50.7 x 63.2 cm). Purchase. 130.84. Page 12

Wrapped. 1969. Pastel, 17 V4 x 2172" (43.7 x 54.4 cm).

Purchase. 305.83. Title page

Untitled {Rome, 1971). 1971. Oil, 22 x 30" (55.9 x 76.2

cm). Bequest of Musa Guston. 202.92. Page 21

Untitled. (1980). Brush and ink, 187/s x 26 V (48 x

67.1 cm). Purchase. 131.84

Untitled. (1980). Synthetic polymer paint and ink,

23 x 29" (58.4 x 73.6 cm). Gift of Musa Guston.

620.87. Page 42

Untitled. (1980). Synthetic polymer paint and ink,

23 x 29" (58.4 x 73.6 cm). Gift of Musa Guston.

621.87. Page 28

29

Untitled. (1980). Synthetic polymer paint and ink on board, 20 x 30" (50.8 x 76.2 cm).

Gift of Musa Guston

Untitled. (1980). Synthetic polymer paint and ink

on board, 20 x 30" (50.8 x 76.2 cm). Gift of Musa

Guston. 622.87. Back cover

Untitled. (1980). Synthetic polymer paint and ink

on board, 20 x 30" (50.8 x 76.2 cm). Gift of Musa

Guston. 623.87

Untitled. (1980). Synthetic polymer paint and ink

on board, 20 x 30" (50.8 x 76.2 cm). Gift of Musa

Guston. 624.87. Page 30

Untitled. (1980). Synthetic polymer paint and ink on

board, 20 x 30" (50.8 x 76.2 cm). Gift of Mrs. Philip

Guston. 318.89. Page 2/

Untitled. (1980). Synthetic polymer paint and ink on

board, 20 x 30" (50.8 x 76.2 cm). Gift of Mrs. Philip

Guston. 319.89. Page 29

Untitled. (1980). Synthetic polymer paint on board,

20 x 30" (50.8 x 76.2 cm). Gift of Mrs. Philip Guston.

320.89

Untitled. (1980). Synthetic polymer paint and ink on

board, 20 x 30" (50.8 x 76.2 cm). Gift of Mrs. Philip

Guston. 321.89

Untitled. (1980). Synthetic polymer paint and ink on

board, 20 x 30" (50.8 x 76.2 cm). Gift of Mrs. Philip

Guston. 322.89

PRINTS AND ILLUSTRATED BOOKS

Untitled. (June 20-26) 1963. Lithograph, 24 Vs x 31W

(62.5 x 79.7 cm). Gift of Kleiner, Bell & Co. 1095.67.

Page 14

Untitled. (June 20-26) 1963. Lithograph, 21'A x 28 Vie"

(54 x 71.5 cm). Gift of Kleiner, Bell & Co. 1096.67

August 14)64 from the series Four on Plexiglas. (1965,

published 1966). Screenprint, printed in color on

Plexiglas, 29 15/i6 x 397/s" (76 x 101.3 cm). Gift of Lester

Avnet. 649.66

Coat. 1980. Lithograph, 23 % x 375/8M (60.3 x 95.6 cm). John B. Turner Fund

Untitled. 1966. Lithograph, 1913/i6 x 29 Vs" (50.3 x

75.2 cm). John B. Turner Fund. 650.66

Nice. 1966. Lithograph, 18'A x 257s" (46.3 x 65.1 cm).

Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Fund. 6.86

Open Washes. 1966. Lithograph, 2015/i6 x 28 9/ig" (51.6 x

72.6 cm). Gift of Associated American Artists. 7.86.

Page 16

Sixteen drawings for Ode to Michael Goldberg (s Birth

and Other Births) for In Memory of My Feelings by

Frank O'Fiara. (1967). Ink on plastic, each: 14 x 11"

(35.5 x 27.9 cm). Gift of the artist. 2202.67.20-35

Six plates for Ode to Michael Goldberg ('s Birth and

Other Births) from In Memory of My Feelings by Frank

O'Hara. New York: The Museum of Modern Art,

1967. Photolithographs, 12 x 9" (30.5 x 27.9 cm). Gift

of The Museum of Modern Art Department of Publi

cations. 92.68.26—31

The Street from the portfolio Ten Lithographs by Ten

Artists. 1970 (published 1971). Lithograph, 19,5/i6 x

26 A" (50.7 x 67 cm). Gift of Dr. Samuel Mandel.

522.84. Page 17

Coat. 1980. Lithograph, z^U x 377s" (60.3 x 95.6 cm).

John B. Turner Fund. 155.81. Page 31

Room. 1980. Lithograph, 287s x 397 s" (73.3 x 101.3 cm).

Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Philip A. Straus. 156.81

Remains from the portfolio Eight Lithographs to

Benefit the Foundation for Contemporary Performance

Arts, Inc. (1980, published 1981). Lithograph, 197s x

2913/i6" (49.9 x 75.7 cm). The Associates Fund. 421.87.2

Gulf. (1979, published 1983). Lithograph, 287s x 3874"

(71.5 x 98.5 cm). Jeanne C. Thayer Fund. 352.87

Painter. (1979, published 1983). Lithograph, 2972 x

39u/i6" (75 x 101.2 cm). Purchase. 353.87

Untitled. (1980). Synthetic polymer paint and ink, 23 x 29" (58.4 x 73.6 cm).

Gift of Musa Guston

I

32

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